- Summaries and comments about three more chapters of Steven Pinker’s THE BLANK SLATE;
- And YouTube tracks from one of my favorite film scores: Richard Robbins’ for The Remains of the Day.
I’ll try to get through the rest of book this week, though I’ll need to be more succinct, or I’ll never finish. Three chapters done previously; 17 to go. Three more in this post.
Chapter 3 described the steps that led to the fall of the walls between matter and mind — the material and spiritual, and so on. Via cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology.
— Ch4, Culture Vultures
Culture is not simply absorbed by people; it depends on learning, which relies on faculties of the mind. Much of culture is simply accumulated local wisdom. People tend to follow the norms of their community. Many things in life lie along a continuum, but decisions must often be binary. [[ well, this is a good point ]] And some conventions exist only in people’s minds [[ one of Harari’s central themes ]]. Cultures, like languages, become different when separated. Why do some cultures dominate others? It’s not about race, cf books by Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond [[ the latter is GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL ]]. Geography was destiny. Nonscientists fear a kind of reductionism. But there’s greedy and good reductionism; the latter is hierarchical [[ as we’ve seen in Carroll and currently in Brian Greene ]]. The very word ‘understanding’ means a kind of reductionism, i.e. descending to deeper levels of analysis. Summary para:
Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than bank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.
